It was the year 1900, the dawn of a new century, a century of
iron, steel and raw industrial power that some would later call the
“American Century.”

Almost a decade earlier, Frederick Jackson
Turner, a Wisconsin professor, had noted in a celebrated lecture the
end of the frontier since no more free government land was
available. The notion of America as an agrarian society would soon
be over.

Already the myth
makers were at work, the dime novelists and penny arcade shows that
romanticized the old frontier, a land of vast spaces and rugged
individual freedom.

In Greenwich Village,
a thirty year old writer named Frank Norris had taken it upon
himself to write a saga of the West, a proposed trilogy about wheat,
California wheat, the crop that fed the nation and was shipped
around the world.

“I think,” Norris had written his mentor, the
distinguished critic, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), “there is a
chance for somebody to do some great work with the West and
California as a background, and which will be at the same time
thoroughly American.” The first novel which Norris would call The
Octopus dealt with the struggle between the wheat farmers in the San
Joaquin Valley, in Central California, and the Southern Pacific
Railroad, the mechanized monster, which crushed the farmers and
ruined them in its grab for profits.

The
“idea” for the story–his “epic” novel–was “so big that it frightens me
at times,” the young novelist had informed his mentor. Nevertheless,
Norris was determined to press forward, and he did, writing away in his
Washington Square apartment throughout 1900 in what historian Kevin
Starr called “almost a single act of spontaneous composition.” (Kevin
Starr, Introduction to The Octopus, Penguin Books, 1986)

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was the ideal
candidate to tackle the task. Brash, handsome, he was born in Chicago in
1870, the son of a wealthy wholesale jeweler. When Frank was fourteen,
the family moved to Oakland, then a year later settled in San Francisco.
They lived in an Italian style Victorian with a great bay window, near
Van Ness and Polk, bustling streets filled with pawnshops and small
tradesmen. This was the neighborhood that Norris would depict in
McTeague, the 1899 novel that the young author hoped would capture life
in San Francisco as Emile Zola’s novels had done for Paris.

In the 1880s, San Francisco was at once rough and glittering, like the
gold nuggets that the ‘49ers had pried from the earth and which built
their mansions on the steep hills overlooking the bay. For an aspiring
writer, the young city teemed with possibilities. The Gold Rush had
drawn adventurers of all kinds and left behind other monuments besides
mansions, including saloons and bordellos, whose denizens had come from
as far away as Chile and Peru.

In a rising metropolis, as in a young nation, history can move at
pell-mell speed. By the 1860s when the piston engine gave birth to the
locomotive, the old ‘49ers were squeamish about putting their capital
into the railroads that were expanding across the country.

In California, this
vacuum was filled by a small group of newly rich Sacramento merchants.
Their numbers included Charles Crocker, an ex-blacksmith from New York,
and Collis Huntington who had worked as a laborer upon his arrival in
California and who later rose to be president of the mighty Southern
Pacific.

Familiar with the wiles
of the state capitol, they would become adept at bribing the legislature
and packing the Railroad Commission to get their way. In The Octopus,
Norris would depict Huntington as the pitiless railroad boss, Shelgrim,
a man to whom the laws of supply and demand were a force of nature that
swept aside everything in their path.

Frank Norris’s mother had
been a stage actress before her marriage, and she encouraged her son’s
artistic aspirations. After a year in a public high school, Norris, his
mother, and young brother went to Paris so Frank could study painting.

In the City of Light,
Norris sketched medieval armor in museums and learned enough Old French
to read The Song of Roland in the original. This romantic view of
history would later carry over to his writing in The Octopus.

Norris attended art
classes in the morning and began sketches for a painting of the Battle
of Crecy, the 1346 encounter in which English archers defeated French
knights and ended the Age of Chivalry. Although the painting was never
completed, when Norris turned from art to writing a few years later,
his creative approach remained visual. In filming Greed, the 1923
movie based upon McTeague, director Erich Von Stroheim is reported to
have followed the book’s plot “page by page, never missing a paragraph.”
(Kenneth Rexroth, Afterward to McTeague, New American Library, 1964) .
The ten hour production was cut by producer Irving Thalberg to a more
manageable two.

Although The Octopus was
composed before the first cameras rolled in Hollywood, there are parts
that are almost cinematic. These include a shootout at a barn dance and
one scene in which the narrative cuts back and forth between a farmer’s
widow starving in the streets of San Francisco and a dinner party at the
home of a railroad prince at which guests enjoy pheasant and sumptuous
desserts.

In 1890 Norris returned
from France and entered the University of California at Berkeley. The
young university had an exciting faculty, some of whom influenced the
future novelist’s thinking. Foremost was zoologist Joseph LeConte whose
lectures on evolution attempted to reconcile man’s brutal animal nature
with the teachings of Christianity. It was the lectures of LeConte,
and the writings of Cesare Lombrosco, a nineteenth century Italian
sociologist, that led Norris to conclude that man was at war with
himself, torn by heredity and a quest for spirituality.

LeConte was a Southerner
who had procured ordnance for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
According to Donald Pizer, a noted Norris scholar, the professor’s
lectures and writing influenced Norris’s view on the supposed supremacy
of the Anglo Saxon race. To Norris, Latins are people of “untamed
passions,” the Chinese “treacherous,” compared to the “robust Anglo
Saxon strain.”

Norris also may have been
caught up in the Populist sentiment that swept the West in the 1890s and
unfairly characterized Jews as agents of Eastern and international
bankers that saddled farmers with harsh mortgages. Indeed, in one
popular cartoon of the period, the House of Rothschild is shown as an
octopus whose tentacles reach around the world. In Norris’s book, a
hated Central Valley railroad agent is depicted as Jewish, though there
is no historical evidence that such a person played a part in the actual
events on which the story was based.

As Professor Pizer points
out in American Naturalism and the Jews, Norris’s anti-Semitism “...has
long been an embarrassment to admirers of the vigor and intensity of his
best fiction and has also contributed to the decline of his reputation
during the past several generations.” ( University of Illinois Press,
2008).

If LeConte and other professors provided Norris
with a viewpoint, it was the novels of Emile Zola (1840-1902)
that were to give him a framework for his narrative themes. “The
world of Mr. Zola is a world of big things,” Norris would write
of the Frenchman whose books he carried around the Berkeley
campus. “The terrible is what counts; no teacup tragedies here.”
Among the French naturalist’s works that Norris admired was Le Voreux, a tale about a miner’s strike that Norris described as
“almost war.”

In an 1896 essay in The Wave, Norris would explain Zola’s theory of
fiction which also was to be his own: “Terrible things must happen to
the characters of the naturalist tale. They must be twisted from the
ordinary...and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that
works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and in sudden death.”
(Frank Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” collected in McTeague,
edited by Donald Pizer, Norton Critical Edition, 1977)

As
a young man, Norris sometimes signed himself “the Boy Zola,” but at
Berkeley he found time for other pursuits besides literature. He
joined a fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, and drew illustrations for the
school yearbook. Along with his fraternity brothers, Frank made the
rounds of Kearny Street saloons and theaters where chorus girls
kicked up their heels in the magical ‘Frisco night.

At college, Frank left behind a legacy of good cheer. For years, after
his untimely death at 32, a humorous dinner ritual Norris had concocted
was held annually at Phi Gamma Delta chapters around the country as a
tribute to him.

A blind spot for mathematics prevented Norris from taking his
degree. After four years, Frank left the university to enroll as
a special student at Harvard. Norris’s parents had been divorced
a few years earlier, and his mother moved to Cambridge to be
near him.

At Harvard, Norris studied French literature and took a
composition course taught by Professor Lewis F. Gates. Although
the professor’s graduate assistant found the young Californian’s
stories “gruesome”–even “repulsive”–Norris used the class to
explore themes he later refined in his novels. A year before
Frank entered Harvard, the San Francisco papers had been filled
with a sensational story about a laborer who brutally murdered
his wife. As Norris scholar James D. Hart noted in a 1970 book,
the author worked on variations of this story which he later
reshaped into McTeague.

Richard Harding Davis had popularized the image of the dashing
foreign correspondent, and in 1895, after a year at Harvard,
Norris sailed for South Africa with dreams of overnight making
his reputation in the Dark Continent. He was in Johannesburg
when a coup backed by Cecil Rhodes, the English mining baron,
seized that city from the South African Dutch.

Norris was immediately caught up in the martial spirit and
joined an English company to hold the city. “Fighting,” he would
later write in a magazine article, “wakes...that fine, reckless
spirit that is the Anglo-Saxon birthright.”

The
rebellion fizzled, however, when Boer commandos forced a relief column
to surrender. According to Kevin Starr, the future author was handed his
passport by a police official “and given twenty-four hours to get out of
the Transvaal.”

Back in San Francisco, Frank Norris settled into the serious
business of becoming a writer. He joined the staff of The Wave,
a weekly magazine that had been founded by the railroad to
promote a large hotel that it owned.

There were “great opportunities for fiction writers in San
Francisco,” Norris quickly recognized, and he explored every
crevice of the city, from Nob Hill, the bastion of the rich, to
the dark crooked alleys of Chinatown. “The people who frequent
them,” he wrote of the neighborhoods of San Francisco, “could
walk right into a novel.”

After two years on The Wave, Frank had become tired of being a
young man about town–one of those “fops” who attended elegant
Pacific Heights dinner parties that he later mocked in his
fiction. He took a leave of absence and headed for a mining camp
in the Sierras where he finished McTeague, his tale of gold and
greed. The camp superintendent was a fraternity brother who
later was one of the models for Annixter, the intellectual
turned farmer in The Octopus who is cut down in the prime of
life by crooked railroad agents.

At first, Norris had
difficulty selling his book, but a Viking tale he had written
caught the eye of S.S. McClure, a muckraking editor, who offered
the struggling novelist a job as a reader at Doubleday, and
finally agreed to publish McTeague after some revisions.

Norris was in New York only a few weeks before he was off to
Cuba to cover the war with Spain in which the sun was to set on
one empire and rise on another. In the brief frenzy of that war,
Frank was shot at, dashed off dispatches, and contracted malaria
which may have helped to shorten his life.

Some six years after Norris began it, McTeague was finally
published. As Kevin Starr noted in a later paperback edition,
“From the vantage point of 1899,” McTeague was “a shocking
story.” (Kevin Starr, Introduction to McTeague, Penguin Books,
1982) With a few notable exceptions, like William Dean Howells,
critics pummeled the book, offended by its graphic depiction of
fighting and murder. Howells, however, praised the book’s
Zolaesque boldness and welcomed it as a clear departure “from
the old-fashioned American novel.”

Frank Norris took the book’s reception in stride. “What pleased
me most about your review...”he wrote a critic, “was the
‘disdaining all pretensions to style.’ It is precisely what I
try to avoid...Who cares for fine style! Tell your yarn and let
your style go to the devil. We don’t want literature, we want
life.”

Norris already had his next “yarn” in mind. It was a theme
worthy of “the preaching novel,” he somewhat wryly told
Howells–a trilogy based on the growth, distribution, and
consumption of wheat. “The Wheat Series,” as he called it.

The author decided to base the
first volume–The Octopus–on an incident known as the Mussel
Slough affair that had occurred in the San Joaquin Valley in
1880. A group of farmers had taken up arms against the railroad
that was trying to evict them after reneging on an apparent
promise to sell them land cheaply. Both sides refused to budge,
leading to a bloody showdown alongside an irrigation ditch the
farmers had dug in the sandy soil.

The origin of the tragedy
reached back to 1862 when a wartime Congress gave private
promoters, including Collis Huntington, millions of dollars to
link California with the Union Pacific Railroad in the East. As
an added incentive, the railroads were granted alternate
sections of land on each side of the tracks–over 12,000 acres
for each mile developed.

Even before the line was
extended to the Central Valley, the railroad lured settlers west
with circulars promising that after the land was improved,
“most” would be sold at “$2.50 to 5.00" an acre, the going rate
for public lands.

Mussel Slough is in the county
of Tulare–Spanish for marshland–and for twenty years, the
farmers worked the soil, raising golden crops of wheat, “as far
as the eye could reach,” as Norris would write.

Early on, the farmers doubted
the railroad’s promise to sell them land at a fair price. To
avoid taxes, the Southern Pacific delayed extending its line to
the Central Valley. When the route was built, the railroad
charged exorbitant rates that were set by its handpicked
commission. The farmers brought a test case in federal court to
invalidate the railroad’s land patents, but a pro-business judge
named Sawyer ruled against them.

The circulars that drew the settlers
to California had loopholes drafted by railroad lawyers. When the
Southern Pacific valued the Mussel Slough parcels at forty dollars–well
above the quoted rates–the farmers, some of whom were former Confederate
soldiers, balked.

Suits were successfully brought to
evict the squatters; the new tenants were driven away by a masked mob.
To protect their land, the farmers bought rifles, and began training as
a militia, as Professor Oscar Cargill later wrote. (Oscar Cargill,
Afterward to The Octopus, New American Library, 1964)

The railroad struck back. It found
dummy buyers, named Hart and Crowe, to purchase the land of disposed
farmers. Crowe–was a skilled gunman. When the new owners
showed up in Hanford to take possession of their land, they were
accompanied by a U.S. marshal. Before he could serve his papers, an
armed group demanded that he turn back.

The marshal was about to retreat when
Crowe pulled out a shotgun and blasted a league member in the face. The
gun battle was on. Someone took a clear shot at Crowe, but the gun
misfired. The mishap proved costly, for Crowe’s aim was deadly; three
farmers died in the field. Two others and Hart expired from their wounds
later.

The marshal was unscathed. Crowe
escaped into the wheat fields where he was found, shot dead in the back
by an unknown avenger. In California, feelings ran high against the
Southern Pacific; the San Francisco Chronicle described railroad owners
as “transportation robbers.”

Brought to trial, the league’s
ringleaders were convicted only of obstructing a federal officer in
performance of his duty, and served eight months in a San Jose prison.
Upon release, they were saluted by a brass band and treated as returning
heroes back home in Hanford.

This was the drama that had captured
Frank Norris’s imagination, and finally in the spring of 1899 drew him
back to California “to study the whole thing on the ground.”

Armed with a small advance from
Doubleday, Frank began his research in San Francisco, where he poured
over back issues of the Chronicle at the Mechanics’ Institute Library on
Post Street. The facts about wheat farming were “piling up B I G,” he
wrote in a letter quoted by critic Carvel Collins. (Carvel Collins,
Introduction to McTeague, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965 ) Soon Norris
was sure his book would be “straight naturalism with all the guts I can
get into it.”

The author briefly visited Hanford,
then headed to the San Benito Ranch, some one hundred miles away for an
extended stay. Located near the coast, the 5,000 acre ranch was owned by a
college chum named Gaston Ashe, and his wife Dolce, who was descended
from one of the Spanish land grant families.

On the ranch, Norris took his place in
the field during wheat harvest and studied the operations of the huge
threshing machines, which he used as background for his novel. He also
met a pretty Spanish nurse on whom he modeled Angele Varian, the
ethereal beauty whose death in childbirth forms one of the book’s
subplots.

In constructing his novel, Norris took
considerable literary license by moving an old Spanish mission inland
and by making his fictitious ranches far larger than those in Tulare
County where the farmers who worked the dry soil were known as “sandlappers.”

The Octopus did not depict a class
struggle; for that literary vogue was still thirty years away. Rather,
Norris pitted prosperous farmers against the even richer railroad to
give the story what Jack London later called “Titanic results.”

Frank returned to New York in October
1899, filled with ideas for his story. It was an extremely happy time
for him. He had fallen in love with Jeanette Black, a San Francisco
debutante whom he had met at a dance some four years earlier. Their
romance blossomed when Norris visited the city to research his novel,
and Jeanette then joined him in New York.

Jeanette was nine years the author’s
junior. She was very fashionable, in a turn of the century style, with,
as Kevin Starr notes, “brown eyes and Gibson girl hair piled high on her
head.” Frank’s mother objected to the alliance, partly on the grounds
that Jeanette’s father had been born in Ireland, but the couple were
married in St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York City in January
1900.

The newlyweds settled in a two room
apartment where Norris threw himself into his work. In October, they
moved to a cottage in New Jersey. There Frank was able to complete his
manuscript free from the distractions of the city.

Sam McClure had left Doubleday, and
Norris lost a courageous supporter; a few years later, McClure’s
Magazine was to publish Ida Tarbell’s sweeping attack on Standard Oil.
According to Oscar Cargill, Frank’s new editor was “nervous” about
Southern Pacific’s reaction to a novel about the Mussel Slough affair.

A meeting was arranged between Collis
Huntington and the young author so that he might hear the railroad’s
side of the story. The meeting took place in Huntington’s New York
office. Norris fictionalized the scene in The Octopus in which Presley,
the young poet, tangles with Shelgrim, the mighty railroad boss.

Huntington was an imposing man
with his white beard and stern manner. In the novel, Shelgrim is
a "powerful" figure who brusquely dismisses the deadly conflict
between the railroad and farmers as "a force born out of certain
conditions"--the naked law of supply and demand. "I--no man--can
stop or control it," he proclaims, before sending Presley away
"stupefied--his brain in a whirl," as Huntington had probably
done to Norris.

More importantly, Huntington revealed
that the wheat farmers had tried to bribe the Railroad Commission. This
disclosure shook Norris’s idealism and put the farmers on the same moral
plane as the Southern Pacific. Norris used the incident which blunted
the book’s harsh criticism of the railroad and added to the raw
naturalist landscape, filled with shady lawyers, a blackmailing
newspaper editor, and a local railroad agent called Behrman who wanted
to charge “whatever the traffic will bear.”

The Octopus was published in April
1901, a month after its author turned 31. “Few major American novels
have been as simultaneously dismissed and respected,” Starr has
concluded. The contemporary reviews set “a pattern of response that has
characterized more than eighty years of critical commentary.” A typical
judgment was that of The Athenaeum, a Boston journal, whose reviewer
criticized Norris’s verbosity and repetition, but conceded that The
Octopus remained “a powerful and tragic piece of fiction.”

Ever restless, Frank visited Chicago to research The Pit, his next
novel, about the distribution of wheat. The book was written hurriedly,
and when posthumously published in 1903, the critics agreed it suffered
from prolixity, like The Octopus, but lacked that story’s Homeric
breath.

For several years, Norris had planned to move back to San Francisco.
Howells had urged him to wait until he had established his reputation
among the New York literati. With the first gush of royalties from The
Octopus Frank, Jeanette, and
their infant daughter relocated to the city Norris regarded as home.

“Happiness in this world,” Frank had written his young brother,
Charles, “is being able to devote all your time to work you love;
nothing else matters.” Later, Charles became a popular novelist and
spent decades as the guardian of his brother’s literary reputation.

Frank was planning a trip to the Orient with Jeanette on a tramp
steamer to study the consumption of wheat and was thinking ahead to
another trilogy on the battle of Gettysburg. According to Kevin Starr,
who is now a professor at the University of Southern California, Norris
considered that battle “the supreme moment in American history.”

On October 20, 1902, Norris suffered
what he thought was indigestion. He delayed going to the
hospital, and when he got there, his condition was misdiagnosed; the
author’s appendix ruptured, peritonitis set in. A few days later, Frank
Norris was dead, his constitution having been weakened by the fevers he
had contracted in South Africa and Cuba. Following an Episcopal service,
Norris was buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

Although Frank Norris’s work was highly praised by Jack London,
and later Willa Cather and others, the Californian never made it
into the ranks of great novelists, like Theodore Dreiser, whose
early book, Sister Carrie, Norris had championed as a reader for
Doubleday. Norris’s overwriting was fatal to a claim of
greatness, as was his depiction of Jews and minorities as one
dimensional characters, which is never a strong attribute in a
writer.

Both The Octopus and McTeague, however, are still considered
important works of American naturalism and are taught in college
classes. As for the Southern Pacific, its power was waning when
the novel appeared. Huntington died before its publication; his
generation of railroad owners was already being overtaken by
modern corsairs, like J. Pierpont Morgan and E.H. Harriman, who
used the tools of corporate and bankruptcy law to loot, then
reorganize railroads for colossal financial gain.

Only “the WHEAT remained” one of the characters, a strange
seer, suggests at the end of The Octopus. Yet, even this was not
so. After the small farmers of the San Joaquin Valley came to
terms with their masters, and stayed on as tenants, they turned
to new crops, perhaps exhausted by the struggle wheat had
brought to the land.

In place of wheat, were planted grapes which were also
harvested as raisins and walnuts, whose groves soon stretched
across the valley where they remain the standard crops around
Hanford and Tulare today.

Here, in an exclusive interview with American Legends, Donald
Pizer, Professor of Literature Emeritus at Tulane University,
discusses via e-mail Frank Norris and The Octopus.

San Joaquin Valley today

AL:

How much Frank Norris material is available to
researchers?

DP:

There really isn’t much Norris manuscript material
anywhere. Not one of his novels is available in full manuscript. There are
scattered pages of McTeague in various libraries and private hands. Most of
Norris’s letters didn’t survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
The largest collection is at the Bancroft Library of the University of
California (Berkeley), and it is sparse.

AL:

How did Norris’s own wealthy background
affect his viewpoint?

DP:

It is sometimes forgotten that Norris’s parents
broke up while he was in his early twenties and that money was not that
plentiful after that. I would say that it is more useful to view him as
having a middle class orientation rather than one derived from inherited
wealth.

AL:

Frank Norris has been criticized as a stylist.
Some critics feel that he overwrote and was repetitious. Why didn’t his
editor at Doubleday cut The Octopus or trim some of his prose?

DP:

Turn-of-the century editors seldom revised style
unless they believed it entirely unacceptable, as was sometimes true of
Theodore Dreiser’s prose. Norris admired the prose of Rudyard Kipling and
Robert Louis Stevenson, but there is a good case to be made that his own
style owes much to that of Charles Dickens in its playful richness.

AL:

Has Norris’s style harmed his literary
reputation?

DP:

To a degree. One well-known remark is that his
prose resembled a wet puppy. A defense of his prose is that the novel by
Norris's time had incorporated most other modes into its form and style,
and that Norris was therefore writing a species of the poetic novel.

AL:

What was the American literary scene like in
the 1890s?

DP:

Most of the periodical criticism of the day was
conservative in the sense that it held that literature should amuse and
instruct and that fiction which dealt with the everyday or with the tragic
existence of the poor did neither. Thomas Hardy’s late novels, for example,
were roundly condemned. William Dean Howells, however, despite the tameness
of his own novels, was quick to recognize the worth and promise of the new
generation of writers, including Norris and Stephen Crane, an endorsement
that Norris greatly appreciated.

AL:

Some critics have
seen in Jack London and Frank Norris elements of fascism.

DP:

I don’t see much profit in attaching twentieth
century political labels to nineteenth century writers. For Norris to have
shared a few ideas with fascism–notably, his racism–is a long way from the
ideological core of fascism.

AL:

Was Norris accused of anti-Semitism during his
life because of McTeague and The Octopus?

DP:

I discuss Norris’s
anti-Semitism at some length in my recent book, American Naturalism and the
Jews. But to answer the question: I don’t recall any comments on Norris’s
anti-Semitism during his own lifetime. His ideas in this regard were widely
shared and there was little in the way of an informed Jewish press to
respond to them.

AL:

In The Octopus, the character S. Behrman is
generally considered Jewish, yet that fact is not explicitly stated.

DP:

Norris probably thought that
Behrman’s characterization–the grossly fat conscienceless money grubber–was
plain enough. It resembled common unfair caricatures during the period of
the Jew.

AL:

What American writers influenced Frank Norris?

DP:

Norris knew Stephen Crane’s
work–he wrote an excellent parody of The Red Badge of Courage-and may have
derived some of his depiction of lower class San Francisco from Crane’s
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. But in general the principal influences on
Norris were British and French writers of the period, especially Kipling and
Zola.

AL:

Was Frank Norris acquainted with Jack London since
they both lived in San Francisco around the same period?

DP:

I believe that Norris and London never met though
they were both raised largely in San Francisco and were only six years apart
in age. They were from very different backgrounds, however, and Norris left
the city for New York at about the time London began to write for the
magazines. Although the two writers resemble each other in a number of
ways–their shared belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, for
example, and their contempt for the “arty” in any form, there seems to be
little direct influence of one on the other.

AL:

One of the main characters in The Octopus is a
strange mystic. Was Norris himself interested in mysticism?

DP:

Vanamee is the only mystic figure in Norris’s
fiction that I can recall. There was a great interest in mysticism during
this period, especially in the possible ability to communicate with the dead
through mediums, but Norris did not appear to share in it, though one of his
San Francisco friends was an ascetic reputed to have psychic powers. Vanamee
served a specific purpose for Norris in The Octopus as a figure who can,
because of his powerful capacity to live the spiritual life, articulate the
basic religious interpretation of experience that Norris wished to make
clear at the end of the work.

AL:

In the novel, Vanamee’s beautiful lover, Angele,
is raped and dies in childbirth. There is a theory that the unknown rapist
whom Norris refers to as The Other was the town padre, Fr. Sarria.

DP:

I believe that an article supporting the notion
of Fr. Sarria as the unknown rapist appeared some years ago. I don’t find
any evidence for this idea either in the novel or in any external source,
including Norris’s surviving papers.

AL:

In both McTeague and The Octopus Norris writes of
the hard side of San Francisco life–of beggars and prostitutes, greed and
poverty. How accurate was his depiction of San Francisco in the 1890s?

DP:

As in any American great city of the 1890s, San
Francisco social life included great wealth and extreme poverty. Norris was
prone to introduce an element of the melodramatic in his accounts of extreme
need, as in Mrs. Hooven’s death [from hunger and malnutrition in The
Octopus] but the conditions were themselves accurately depicted. There is
little in Norris’s accounts which differ from the first-hand reports of
1890s New York Lower East Side in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives.

AL:

How important was Norris’s interview with Collis
Huntington in terms of The Octopus’s ending?

DP:

My own reading of the conclusion of The Octopus is
that Norris was responsive to the personal power and philanthropy of
Huntington but that he also recognized the sophistry of Huntington’s defense
of railroad practices on the basis that they were inseparable from natural
processes, a view that later came to be called Social Darwinism.

AL:

Some critics believe that the book’s ending is a
copout.

DP:

Remember, Presley is initially impressed by
Shelgrim’s argument but later explicitly rejects it since it does not
reflect his powerful sense that the ranchers had been deceived by the
railroad and that Annixter and Hooven have been lead to their deaths by its
actions. In brief, Norris held that natural processes are indeed supreme and
do in the end produce progress for mankind as a whole, but that men (and
corporations) must still be held accountable for their actions. It is
helpful in understanding this belief to realize that if one substitutes God
for Norris’s idea of nature, one is left with the conventional Christian
paradox of a benevolent and omnipotent God who nevertheless permits man free
will and thus responsibility for his own fate even if it leads to evil.

AL:

What American writers have Norris influenced and
are there any of his literary descendants writing today?

DP:

A number of specific influences have been noted,
including the early work of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) . More recently,
the scene in the late John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich, in which Rabbit and his
wife make love in a bed filled with gold coins, closely resembles that of
Tina in bed with her gold coins in McTeague. But Norris’s more significant
influence on later generations of American writers was the general effect of
his demonstration that any range and any aspect of American life was
available to the American writer for serious-minded exploration.

(Additional background
information was obtained from Professor Kenneth S. Lynn’s Introduction to
The Octopus, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958, and J.L. Brown, The Mussel Slough
Tragedy, 1958 as well as Wikipedia, "Battle of Crecy." Retrieved Sept.
2010). AL would like to thank Michael Roux of the University of
Illinois Press for arranging this interview.)